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Yesterday, some residents of Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, were left without electricity after the city's power company got attacked by a ransomware virus. City Power, the company responsible for powering South Africa's financial capital Johannesburg, confirmed Thursday on Twitter that it had been hit by a Ransomware virus that had encrypted all of its databases, applications, and network. The attack prevented prepaid customers from buying electricity units, upload invoices when making payments, or access the City Power's official website, eventually leaving them without power. "Please note that the virus hit us early Thursday morning, compromising our database and other software, impacting most of our applications and networks," the city government said in a tweet . However, the company has also ensured its customers that none of their details were compromised in the cyber attack. At the time of writing, the company confirmed they h

An Irish national has been jailed for six-and-a-half years for his role as one of the administrators and forum moderators who helped run now-defunct dark web marketplace " Silk Road ." Gary Davis , 31, of Wicklow, Ireland, was known as 'Libertas' on the Silk Road website, then-largest underground black marketplace on the Internet used by thousands of people to buy and sell drugs and other illegal goods and services. Silk Road site administrators were responsible for, among other things, monitoring user activity on the underground website for any problem, responding to customer service inquiries, and resolving any dispute between buyers and vendors. Davis was indicted by U.S. federal prosecutors in 2013 when authorities shut down the Silk Road website and arrested its founder Ross William Ulbricht , who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 after being convicted on multiple counts related to the black marketplace. "During its operation from 2011 un

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

Are you using an Android device? Beware! You should be more careful while playing a video on your smartphone—downloaded anywhere from the Internet or received through email. That's because, a specially crafted innocuous-looking video file can compromise your Android smartphone—thanks to a critical remote code execution vulnerability that affects over 1 billion devices running Android OS between version 7.0 and 9.0 (Nougat, Oreo, or Pie). The critical RCE vulnerability (CVE-2019-2107) in question resides in the Android media framework, which if exploited, could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a targeted device. To gain full control of the device, all an attacker needs to do is tricking the user into playing a specially crafted video file with Android's native video player application. Though Google already released a patch earlier this month to address this vulnerability, apparently millions of Android devices are still waiting for the latest A

The fileless code injection technique called Process Doppelgänging is actively being used by not just one or two but a large number of malware families in the wild, a new report shared with The Hacker News revealed. Discovered in late 2017, Process Doppelgänging is a fileless variation of Process Injection technique that takes advantage of a built-in Windows function to evade detection and works on all modern versions of Microsoft Windows operating system. Process Doppelgänging attack works by utilizing a Windows feature called Transactional NTFS (TxF) to launch a malicious process by replacing the memory of a legitimate process, tricking process monitoring tools and antivirus into believing that the legitimate process is running. Few months after the disclosure of this technique, a variant of the SynAck ransomware became the first-ever malware exploiting the Process Doppelgänging technique, targeting users in the United States, Kuwait, Germany, and Iran. Shortly after th

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new variant of WatchBog , a Linux-based cryptocurrency mining malware botnet, which now also includes a module to scan the Internet for Windows RDP servers vulnerable to the Bluekeep flaw . BlueKeep is a highly-critical, wormable, remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows Remote Desktop Services that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to take full control over vulnerable systems just by sending specially crafted requests over RDP protocol. Though the patches for the BlueKeep vulnerability (CVE–2019-0708) was already released by Microsoft in May this year, more than 800,000 Windows machines accessible over the Internet are still vulnerable to the critical flaw. Fortunately, even after many individuals in the security community developed working remote code exploits for BlueKeep, there is no public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit available till the date, potentially preventing opportunistic hackers from wreaking h

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new piece of mobile surveillance malware believed to be developed by a Russian defense contractor that has been sanctioned for interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Dubbed Monokle , the mobile remote-access trojan has been actively targeting Android phones since at least March 2016 and is primarily being used in highly targeted attacks on a limited number of people. According to security researchers at Lookout, Monokle possesses a wide range of spying functionalities and uses advanced data exfiltration techniques, even without requiring root access to a targeted device. How Bad is Monokle Surveillance Malware In particular, the malware abuses Android accessibility services to exfiltrate data from a large number of popular third-party applications, including Google Docs, Facebook messenger, Whatsapp, WeChat, and Snapchat, by reading text displayed on a device's screen at any point in time. The malware also extracts

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today officially confirmed that Facebook has agreed to pay a record-breaking $5 billion fine over privacy violations surrounding the Cambridge Analytica scandal . Besides the multibillion-dollar penalty, the company has also accepted a 20-year-long agreement that enforces it to implement a new organizational framework designed to strengthen its data privacy practices and policies. The agreement requires Facebook to make some major structural changes, as explained below, that will hold the company accountable for the decisions it makes about its users' privacy and information it collects on them. "The order requires Facebook to restructure its approach to privacy from the corporate board-level down, and establishes strong new mechanisms to ensure that Facebook executives are accountable for the decisions they make about privacy and that those decisions are subject to meaningful oversight," the FTC said in a press release . Ac

A former Siemens contractor has pledged guilty in federal court Friday to secretly planting code in automated spreadsheets he had created for the company over a decade ago that deliberately crashes the program every few years. David Tinley, a 62-year-old resident of Harrison City, Pennsylvania, was hired by Siemens as a contract employee for Monroeville, Pennsylvania location, in 2002 to create custom automated spreadsheets for various Siemens projects related to the power generation industry. However, according to the United States Justice Department ( DoJ ), Tinley intentionally and without the company's knowledge or authorization inserted "logic bombs" into computer programs that caused glitches in the spreadsheet after the expiration of a certain date. Logic Bomb is a piece of computer code intentionally inserted into software or system to carry out specific operations like crash or malfunction after certain conditions are met, or an amount of time has expire

A German security researcher has publicly disclosed details of a serious vulnerability in one of the most popular FTP server applications, which is currently being used by more than one million servers worldwide. The vulnerable software in question is ProFTPD , an open source FTP server used by a large number of popular businesses and websites including SourceForge, Samba and Slackware, and comes pre-installed with many Linux and Unix distributions, like Debian. Discovered by Tobias Mädel , the vulnerability resides in the mod_copy module of the ProFTPD application, a component that allows users to copy files/directories from one place to another on a server without having to transfer the data to the client and back. According to Mädel, an incorrect access control issue in the mod_copy module could be exploited by an authenticated user to unauthorizedly copy any file on a specific location of the vulnerable FTP server where the user is otherwise not allowed to write a file.